07/28/2025
🕯️ Let’s Be Honest About What’s Happening at Preah Vihear 🕯️
Before music, I worked in cultural preservation, at the Global Heritage Fund.
We fought to protect World Heritage Sites in places where war, greed, and corruption put them at risk. I learned something important in that time:
When a heritage site is destroyed, it’s not just stone and brick that crumbles, it’s identity, it’s memory,
it’s a targeted strike on the psychological spine of a people.
Preah Vihear is a UNESCO-protected World Heritage Site. Its destruction is not collateral damage, it is a message, meant to humiliate, to provoke, to remind Cambodia of its place in the eyes of those who still believe we are less than.
And let’s be clear, under international law, deliberately destroying a site like Preah Vihear, when it has no military justification, can be classified as a war crime.
This is not exaggeration,
this is precedent.
In 2016, the International Criminal Court convicted a man for destroying sacred mausoleums in Mali. He was sentenced to 9 years in prison. Other cases include ISIS destroying Palmyra and Nimrud, the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas, and Al-Mahdi convicted at the ICC for demolishing Timbuktu’s shrines — all recognized as crimes against humanity and heritage.
So why should Cambodia be expected to endure this in silence?
Ask yourselves this,
Is the Thai military using terror tactics?
Because when you destroy a sacred site, not for defense, but to make a point, what else do you call that?
Look in the mirror.
History will.
Cambodians know what it’s like to be treated as disposable. My mother and father were shot at and left for dead in Preah Vihear. And now, decades later, I’m watching new acts of violence play out in the same place, with the same cruelty, this time through the destruction of one of the most sacred sites in our country.
I speak not from hate,
I speak from memory.
🚨This is psychological warfare. And it is a crime against heritage, against identity, and against peace. We ask the international community, UNESCO, and the ICC, Do your job. Protect what you claimed you would protect.
🇰🇠Cambodia is not passive,
We are not voiceless,
We have survived too much to accept this in silence.
